"Will you let me speak to her alone first," he asked, "for a few minutes?"
"I'll take a turn up the street then," returned Banks eagerly, still panting from his hurried walk up the long hill. "She's in the room on the right now," he added, "I can see her feeding the canary."
Ordway nodded indifferently. "I shan't be long," he said, and going inside the gate, passed deliberately up the walk and into the room where Milly stood at the window with her mouth close against the wires of the gilt cage.
At his step on the threshold the girl turned quickly toward the door with a fluttering movement. Surprise and disappointment battled for an instant in her glance, and he gathered from his first look that he had come at the moment when she was expecting Wherry. He noticed, too, that in spite of the mild autumn weather, she wore a dark dress which was not unsuitable for a long journey, and that her sailor hat, from which a blue veil floated, lay on a chair in one corner. A deeper meaning had entered into the shallow prettiness of her face, and he felt that she had passed through some subtle change in which she had left her girlhood behind her. For the first time it occurred to him that Milly Trend was deserving not only of passion, but of sympathy.
At the withdrawal of the lips that had offered him his bit of cake, the canary fluttered from his perch and uttered a sweet, short, questioning note; and in Milly's face, as she came forward, there was something of this birdlike, palpitating entreaty.
"Oh, it is you, Mr. Smith," she said, "I did not hear your ring."
"I didn't ring," responded Ordway, as he took her trembling outstretched hand in which she still held the bit of sponge cake, "I saw you at the window so I came straight in without sending word. What I have to say to you is so important that I dared not lose a minute."
"And it is about me?" asked Milly, with a quiver of her eyelids.
"No, it is about someone else, though it concerns you in a measure. The thing I have to tell you relates directly to a man whom you know as Horatio Brown——"
He spoke so quickly that the girl divined his meaning from his face rather than from his words.